| Sumario: | The article reviews *Hurricane Jim Crow: How the Great Sea Island Storm of 1893 Shaped the Lowcountry South*, which examines the 1893 hurricane’s role in reshaping South Carolina’s Lowcountry during the transition from Reconstruction to Jim Crow. The book argues that the storm acted as a “force of contingency” that accelerated changes in land ownership, labor systems, and racial governance, intertwining environmental disaster with white supremacist policymaking and economic reorganization. Through the life of Quash Stevens, a Black man connected to the region’s history of slavery, the study highlights how African American communities navigated recovery amid intensified racial oppression. The work challenges narratives of environmental catastrophe as natural or apolitical, emphasizing its mediation through racial capitalism and state power, and situates the hurricane within broader debates on the “New South” and the emergence of Jim Crow. This analysis offers insights into the complex entanglement of nature, race, and political economy in the Lowcountry and contributes to scholarship on environmental history, African American history, and disaster studies.
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